Foreword Dilip — I shall call him Dilip, as Dilip Kumar Roy sounds too pompous for so ethereal and lovable a spirit — Dilip has evolved an 'art' of biography all his own. Perhaps the word 'evolved' is somewhat inappropriate here: Dilip hasn't pursued laborious technological processes to arrive at his 'art'; it has just come to him or he has come by it as a matter of course — an edict of destiny, if you will, but no frowns, no tears, no nerve-racking researches. His two earlier works —Among the Great and The Subhash I knew — have made us familiar with the contours of this 'art' — an art so artless that it resembles the sinuous movements of a mountain-stream rather than the rigid

CHAPTER VII Guru, The Transformer The more I brooded over man's utter helplessness when he is at odds with his own human nature, the less hopeful I felt about my prospective ability to make good in such a difficult undertaking as Yoga, that is, to effect a junction with the Divine Grace to be able to surmount Destiny. At such times, I bitterly complained to Gurudev: why, oh, why had he dragged me to such a path.. . .But since the milk was split, alas, the sooner I was allowed to graze on other fields the better for all... I must not waste his time any more ... no wonder he had been growing cold and so on and so forth. But if Dilip was Dilip, Gurudev also

CHAPTER IX The Poet-Maker I referred, in a previous chapter, to Sri Aurobindo as a "poet-maker." In this I am going to transcribe a part of my experience on which I based the remark, less to convince others than to state — as truthfully as I can — some of the data which carried conviction to me, personally. I know of course that what I am claiming here is liable to be misunderstood since my chief datum is going to be my own poetic flowering. Nevertheless I have thought fit to risk it because nobody else will be able to present the material I possess and so, if I keep silent, a great trait of Sri Aurobindo's character will stay for ever unknown, to wit, the pain

CHAPTER VI "Bleeding Piece of Earth"* One of the things that make Ashram life so hard to bear is that it first invites one to change, then exhorts, then coaxes and lastly presses one to realise that unless and until one agrees to change progressively, the divine life must remain a Utopian dream. Somebody said that human folly makes even angels weep because human idiocy is the only malady for which even the gods can find no medicine. Sri Aurobindo, however, was wont to put it in a different way. He said that it was not folly alone, but some kind of perversity (which something in us thrills to) that makes it so difficult even for angles to deliver fools from their c